The song is in no way affiliated with the movie, but I certainly rushed to release it in tandem. I sent them a copy while they were still editing: “Hey, y’all, I know that you’re working on the movie. I’ve been working on this song for about 10 years.” That’s true. I’ve been trying to write a Tonya Harding song for a long time. The musical director got back to us and said, “Um, we’re kind of going in a different direction.”

The live show was shot and produced by We Are Films, edited by Keith Bradshaw, and mixed by Casey Foubert. The video will be available on YouTube and Vimeo, and the audio will be available for purchase and/or streaming on all platforms (iTunes, Spotify, Tidal, and Bandcamp, etc.).

A “Christian Nation” is absolutely heretical. Christ did not come into this world to become a modifier. Look what happened to the Holy Roman Empire.

Jesus said you must hate your mother and father and love your enemies. This is not obtuse provocation, but it’s spiritual deployment of true identity, which no longer resides in skin color combination, ideology, genealogy, name, people, places and things, but in the brotherhood and sisterhood of all humankind, which is ruled by love at any cost.

There really is no such thing as an illegal immigrant, for we are all immigrants and refugees in a wildly changing world that is dominated by superfluous boundaries built by blood and war. We all come from somewhere else. The truest of “Americans” have either been destroyed by the white immigrant, incarcerated, isolated, held captive, or stolen and enslaved. We are all complicit in the injustices against basic human rights and common decency, to put it mildly, which renders our own “inalienable rights” as questionable or obsolete.

Set to debut in the festival’s Premieres section on Jan. 22, Call Me by Your Name is based on Andre Aciman’s novel of the same name and stars Armie Hammer as a 24-year old American scholar spending the summer of 1983 in Northern Italy, where he attracts the attention of a 17-year-old Jewish-American boy, played by Timothee Chalamet. Michael Stuhlbarg rounds out the cast as the boy’s father.

“I used to work next door to Sufjan’s studio in Brooklyn,” an anonymous poster recounted on Reddit yesterday. “One day, while he was renovating the place, he threw a bunch of stuff into the building’s dumpster. I salvaged this…as far as I know, I don’t think it’s ever been released.”

I deleted the Reddit post because I felt awful about sharing the album after Asthmatic Kitty’s spokesperson kindly asked me not to. That was definitely a misstep on my part. I should have respected his wishes. On the other hand…this is trash we’re talking about. Publicly available trash. I didn’t Frankenstein the album together; it was right there, perfectly intact, complete with a clean-cut square of album art and a track listing. After discovering that it was never released, and reading the desperation from Sufjan fans who really wanted to hear this little piece of his history, I decided it best to allow Stalker to live through the self-multiplying preservationists that make the internet what it is. The alternative was a sad, quiet death for an album that I think shows a wonderfully playful side of Sufjan’s early career.